[cardanome]

The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.

It can bounce back over time and maybe leave us better off than before but the short term will not be pretty. Think industrial revolution where we had to stop companies by law from working children to literal death.

Whether the working man or the capital class profits from the rise of productivity is a questions of political power.

We have seen that productivity rises do not increase work compensation anymore: https://substack.com/home/post/p-165655726

Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.

We already saw mass layoffs by the big tech leaders and we will see it in smaller companies as well.

Sure there will always be need for experienced devs in some fields that a security critical or that need to scale but that simple CRUD app that serves 4 consecutive users? Yeah, Greg from marketing will be able to prompt that.

It doesn't need be the case that prompt engineers are paid less money, true. But with us being so disorganized the corporations will take the opportunity to cut cost.

[bgwalter]

> Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.

You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people.

You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.

This addresses the union part. It is true that software engineers tend to be conflict averse and not very socially aware, so many of them follow the current industry opinion like lemmings.

If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.

[jopsen]

> If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.

Search youtube for "yes minister" :)

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On topic, I think it's a fair point that fighting is borderline useless. Companies that don't embrace new tech will go out of business.

That said, it's entirely unclear what the implications will be. Often new capabilities doesn't mean the industry will shrink. The industry haven't shrunk as a result of 100x increase in compute and storage, or decrease in size and power usage.

Computers just became more useful.

I don't think we should be too excited about AI writing code. We should be more excited about the kinds of program we can write now. There is going to be a new paradigm of computer interaction.

[jplusequalt]

>You can fight without unions.

And you can fly without wings--just very poorly.

Unions are extremely important in the fight of preserving worker rights, compensation, and benefits.

[autoexec]

> You can fight without unions.

You can fight without an army too, but it's a lot less effective. There is strength in numbers. Corporations know this and they leverage that strength against their employees. You all alone vs. them is exactly how they like it.

[StefanBatory]

> You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.

This works only if everyone is on with this. If they're not, you're shooting yourself in the foot while doing job hunting.

[jdright]

> This addresses the union part.

lol, good luck with that.

you thinking that one or two people doing non organized _boycott_ is the same thing as an union tell a lot about you.

[bgwalter]

I didn't mention one or two people, I mentioned a theoretical strategy that is also employed by non-unionized bureaucracies. And I admitted that the strategy is impeded by the fact that many software developers are self-loathing people with no spine.

It is possible that obedient people need highly paid union bosses, i.e., new leaders they can follow.

[jdright]

You're wrong, obedient people are exactly the type that don't need unions, they are obedient and accept anything.

Unions are for people that don't accept anything and know that they are a target taking action alone or in non organized ways.

Unions are the way to multiply the forces and work as a group with common interests, it is for people that are not extremely selfish and egocentric.

[redeeman]

why do you need a union? everyone should just set their personal standards for what they accept/demand, and then let the market sort it out? someone wants to work for $20/hour programming, in a fashion that can satisfy some demand? great, then I will simply NOT be doing that job. Everyone wins even though I do not get that particular job. Someone is willing to work 7 days a week as they prefer to grind to earn more money? good on them. Its not gonna be me, They win the job, I dont.

Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this

[aaronbaugher]

History, especially the industrial age, says that attitude leads to a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's willing to work for a little less, in a little shittier conditions, to pack a few more family members into a shitty apartment to make do.

If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.

I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.

[triceratops]

> Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this

We tried that in the past. The work still got done, and workers just died more often. If you want to live in that reality move to a developing country with poor labor protections.

[paulcole]

> The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.

Didn’t Greg-from-marketing’s life just get a lot better at the same time?

[trod1234]

> The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.

This all assumes that such revolutions are built on resiliency and don't actually destroy the underpinning requirements of organized society. Its heavily skewed towards survivor bias.

Our greatest strength as a species is our ability to communicate knowledge, experience, and culture, and act as one large overarching organism when threats appear.

Take away communication, and the entire colony dies. No organization can occur, no signaling. There are two ways to take away communication, you prevent it from happening, or you saturate the channel to the Shannon Limit. The latter is enabled by AI.

Its like an ant hill or a bee hive where a chemical has been used to actively and continually destroy the pheromones the ants rely upon for signalling. What happens? The workers can't work, food can't be gathered, the hive dies. The organism is unable to react or adapt. Collapse syndrome.

Our society is not unlike the ant-hill or bee hive. We depend on a fine balance of factors doing productive work and in exchange for that work they get food, or more precisely money which they use to buy food. Economy runs because of the circulation of money from producer to factor to producer. When it sieves into fewer hands and stays there, distortions occur, these self-sustain and then eventually we are at the point where no production can occur because monetary properties are lost under fiat money printing. There is a narrow working range where outside the range on each side everything catastrophically fails. Hyper-inflation/Deflation

AI on the other hand eliminates capital formation of the individual. The time value of labor is driven to zero. There is a great need for competent workers for jobs, but no demand because no match can occur; communication is jammed. (ghost jobs/ghost candidates)

So you have failures on each end, which self-sustain towards socio-economic collapse. No money circulation going in means you can't borrow from the future through money printing. Debasement then becomes time limited and uncontrollable through debt traps, narrow working price range caused by consistent starvation of capital through wage suppression opens the door to food insecurity, which drives violence.

Resource extraction processes have destroyed the self-sustaining flows such that food in a collapse wouldn't even support half our current population, potentially even a quarter globally. 3 out of 4 people would die. (Malthus/Catton)

These things happen incredibly slowly and gradually, but there is a critical point we're about 5 years away from it if things remain unchanged, there is the potential that we have already passed this point too. Objective visibility has never been worse.

This point of no return where the dynamics are beyond any individual person, and after that point everyone involved in that system is dead but they just don't know it yet.

Mutually Assured Destruction would mean the environment becomes uninhabitable if chaos occurs and order is lost in such a breakdown.

We each have significant bias to not consider the unthinkable. A runaway positive feedback system eventually destroys itself, and like a dam that has broken with the waters rushing towards individuals; no individual can hold back those forces.